Shooting Wide Open

The barreleye fish can rotate its eyes upward and literally look through its own transparent head to see objects positioned above it! The rest of its body looks like your regular opaque fish, but the head dome is transparent. You can see its internal organs. A bit from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute press release:

Ever since Macropinna microstoma was first described in 1939, marine biologists have known that its tubular eyes are very good at collecting light. However, the eyes were believed to be fixed in place and seemed to provide only a “tunnel-vision” view of whatever was directly above the fish’s head. A new paper by Bruce Robison and Kim Reisenbichler shows that these unusual eyes can rotate within a transparent shield that covers the fish’s head.

Most of the time, the fish hangs motionless in the water, with its body in a horizontal position and its eyes looking upward. The green pigments in its eyes may filter out sunlight coming directly from the sea surface, helping the barreleye spot the bioluminescent glow of jellies or other animals directly overhead. When it spots prey, the fish rotates its eyes forward and swims upward, in feeding mode.

Lucky researchers, but the fish was less fortunate. It “survived for several hours in a ship-board aquarium.” One day we will find a way to study deep sea critters without killing them.

Bonus round: there is also the frogfish which has leg-like fins, an off-centered tail and bounces around on the sea floor chaotically. You can see this particular species at the California Academy of Sciences if you’re in San Francisco. Good luck getting it to bounce around for you though. A tip for the frugal: go during a Thursday Nightlife event, where you get the benefit of music (a bit loud and clubby), drinks and talks. Parts of the aquarium are in nighttime/rest mode and the events are 21+, but admission is $10 instead of $25. There are also some photos related to the issue of climate change being displayed. They are strictly what you would expect for this type of venue, but worth a look if you’re going anyway.

Li Wei

Do you work in phases? The reading research phase. The shooting phase. The editing phase. The promotion phase. I’ve been multitasking for multiple projects and it’s beginning to overwhelm. I want to dig into shooting and reading, but I don’t want to let this little blog go fallow! I feel so much more productive while reading though. I finish a blog post and it’s simply one in an endless series, the expectation for more is still there. But close a book and that’s final. There are few things that give me a greater sense of accomplishment than finishing a book, irrational as that is.

Lauren Dukoff

Of Devandra Banhart fame.

Serge Alleyne with Basillic Studio

I’m having trouble understanding the French, but I think they’ve wrapped the rooftops and railcars of several African villages with large images of women’s eyes so that they’re visible from space via say, Google maps. You can see the original full portraits of the women on the site too.

If you haven’t seen the short films of Adam Pescadero, also known as PES, he uses everyday materials in a very fun way. Western Spaghetti here has supplanted Kaboom!, which you can see on his website along with other shorts, as my favorite.

I just finished a film, Still Life, by Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhang Ke, which tells the parallel stories of two people trying to find their relatives as a result of displacement caused by the Three Gorges damn project and development in southern China.

The actual Chinese title of the film (San Xia Hao Ren) literally translates to “The Good People of Three Gorges,” which hints at the content of the film, but “Still Life” would be a very fitting subtitle. It is a very visual, photographic film full of very slow pans and shots that are so static and quiet they literally look like photo stills. It only occurred to me afterward that the element of time makes films like this so much more effective than photo essays at capturing the true drawn-out drudgery of poverty. There is a terrible and misleading tendency in some works to glamorize the camarderie of menial laborers or the sometimes quirky makeshift trappings of poverty that is completely lacking here. The poverty in this film is not the “we’re poor but full of energy and find happiness in what we can” type that goes down easier and to some extent appeases our guilt a little. Instead, Jia avoids the “salt of the earth” archetype and shows poverty as an endless, back-breaking and monotonous grind in which a person is forced to risk his life for a bit of money.

He also shows a glimpse of the flip side of development in the second half of the film, but the success of developers is only spoken of and unseen, and the film for the most part follows the story of the rural working poor.

Be warned that this film is deliberate and almost infuriatingly slow-paced. There’re virtually no dramatic events certainly not the kind of soundtrack that tells you what to feel. The plot, one that is utterly without twist or gimmick, unfolds very slowly, and though each person’s journey is very important in their lives, the plot as a narrative device is subservient to the context in which it takes place. The real impact of the film comes from the accumulated force of the little details like the offhand comments made by incidental characters and small moments like the Euros-to-RMB magic trick at the beginning of the film, which pass without direct commentary.

I didn’t like Jia’s earlier film, The World, which deal with similar themes but felt a bit too forced in its unusual setting to me. The more involved plot drew my attention away from the social issues hovering near the surface. Still Life feels much more true.

It’s unclear what proportion of the cast are actually professional actors. A few of the main characters certainly are, but the flat, inscrutable expressions on the faces of some of the minor characters lack the clear intent to show found in the character acting I’m accustomed to. In fact, the idea for the movie came out of an hour-long documentary on a Chinese painter travelling to the Si Chuan area to paint (included on the DVD), and in that short you can see some of the sequences that were ultimately included in the feature film. In an interview (also on the DVD), Jia Zhang Ke states that within days of arriving in the Three Gorges area, he knew he had to make a film there.

There is also the excrutiating sequence when the painter visits the widow and children of a worker killed on the job during their stay. He brings them photographs of the man that they had taken, as well as brightly colored gifts for the children which seem entirely out of place in the damp grey room full of drably dressed poor people. One of the gifts is a neon pink Snow White backpack for the daughter. What a telling moment – out goes their livelihood and in comes Disney.

The gifts jog my memory of Nachtwey’s story of a man in southeast Asia who lived by the side of railway tracks, without property and without dignity. Donations poured in after viewers saw Nachtwey’s photos and the man was able to move his family into a proper room. Not to discount the impact of single donations, but both these incidents make me wonder if we’re really that simple-minded in our thinking. Instead of giving more support to organizations that attempt to solve the problem at its source, to curb the social ills that create these circumstances, we tend to focus on individual cases and on treating the symptoms, as it were. It’s like trying to patch thousands of burst water pipes. Wouldn’t it be better if we just developed a type of pipe that’s not so prone to bursting? But I suppose it’s an apt metaphor – the infrastructure of those old pipes is not so easy to disassemble and replace.

I initially meant to post a little paragraph letting you guys know about the film. Instead, this has turned into a good sized review with full-on soapbox action! But my long-windedness aside, you should really check the film out, especially since it’s, aside from a couple of incongruous computer effects, eminently watchable for photographers and filmmakers. (Some scenes seem to recall other movies – the end of Fight Club, the panning dinner conversation in Greenaway’s The Draughtsman’s Contract…)

Mu Ge

Do photographers get together like bands and make photographs? I don’t mean collectives who display together or who make similar work. I can think of very few instances, but for the most part it feels a bit unnatural to think of a photo as anything but the work of one person. I enjoy the solitary-ness of looking through the viewfinder, but occasionally I get curious about what working with, not just shooting in the same place with other people would be like.

And could the photo industry be like the music industry in the sense of people buying photos to carry around and look at? We’ve found a way to make our music portable, but aside from tiny cellphone wallpapers, good photography is not available for purchase in the same way. (Does anyone have fine art photography on their portable digital devices?)

It’s too bad that there are at least a few hours of the day you can fill with music off a hard drive but only so much wall space for eye candy, and most people don’t seem to be in the habit of rotating their visual decor very often. I suppose it’s just a consequence of our being able to multi-task while listening to music but not so much while looking at something.

I saw this snippet of an interview with writer Jonathan Safran Foer on the Daily Routines blog:

I think music is probably the most directly impactful art form. I mean, it’s the one that, within three minutes, you can find yourself screaming at the top of your lungs and banging your fists. And a novel never does that.

I mean, certainly you can’t, like, turn up the volume on a poem. A poem is still always going to be a more active experience than listening to music. And there’s something about the passiveness of it that allows for whatever mood you’re in to really enter.

You could say the same thing about music and photography. There’s something more intimately emotional about music that most photography cannot trump. (Though these photos of a giant mechanical spider in Leeds comes close. via Conscientious.) I suppose an art form that’s pumped directly inside your head is bound to have more impact than one that’s perceived to be outside the body. Could it also be raw effect of the human voice (or face) on some deep evolutionary level? Both simulate the experience of being in the presence of a person. Being able to make out their features means they’re close, but hearing a voice… well, if they’re close enough to be clearly audible, they must be really close!

For the most part though, music is a terrible vehicle for knowledge. Text or spoken language is the only precise way to convey complex non-procedural factual knowledge, and so the invention of writing made large scale civilization possible, but because we evolved to hear and see before we learned to read and write, we still react more strongly to music and visuals.

A lot of photojournalism plays to the emotions – portraits, the aftermath of conflict, the consequences of disease – but can an image relay the historical context of problems, political angles or workable solutions with any real clarity, whether it’s a standalone image or an in-depth photo essay, without text, without being diagrammatic? I haven’t quite figured this out.

Santiago Mostyn

Namely his Mississippi River project. You can see a few of these in a corner of Needles + Pens, a zine and DIY art store in San Francisco.

Also, the VII photo agency multimedia gallery contains videos from 2006 of photojournalists James Nachtwey, Ron Haviv, Christopher Morris, Lauren Greenfiled and John Stanmeyer speaking at length to Alex Chadwick of NPR or to a lecture audience about their careers and work. The conversations are from seminars, so they’re about a half hour or so long, not the usual soundbyte snippets.

I was most interested to hear about their early careers. Greenfield talks about going through Nachtwey’s film while an intern at National Geographic. Nachtwey himself makes a horticulture joke and talks about his late self-education – why he left Time for an obscure New Mexico newspaper, when he decided he was ready for the big time, learning to think locally.

I have a long list of things I don’t want to write about, so instead, I bring you a little piece of video editing from Lasse Gjersten. Now people who can’t play instruments can make music that’s not incredibly out of tune, and look cool while doing it! That’s good news to a rhythm-challenged person like me anyway.

William Gedney

I’ve been digging through Duke Library’s Gedney collection looking at all the contact sheets. I love seeing other photographer’s contact sheets, the sense they give of the photographer’s approach of a subject, the momentary reactions to the scene rather than the well-considered edit afterwards.

I took advantage of SFMOMA’s monthly free day and was promptly turned off by their semi-interactive show The Art of Participation. Only at an institution like MOMA would a show with the word participation in its title include signs that say “Do not touch” and staff who sternly ask people to “step behind the line.” To be honest, I’d rather there be a physical railing between the work and I than some invisible barrier that I’m not too sure of. I feel like I’m constantly being watched and that’s not my idea of a fun time viewing art.

Some pieces were interaction friendly while others were historical and off limits. You could tell what was which by observing other people, but to be sure, you had to glance at the sign. Personally, I want to look at the work first before reading any (preferably no) signs, so this was a bit deflating, like somebody scraped the icing off the cake. I walked into a dark room with a circle of vintage microphones, and the staff member encouraged me to participate by demonstrating speaking into the mics and virtually jumping around the room. I gotta give her some credit for doing her job enthusiastically, but by that point, I was in no mood to join in. Participation is a choice isn’t it?

However, I’ve never seen so many young people having fun there before (I think there may have been a school trip). Definitely a welcome change from the usual hovering in dead silence. Maybe I’m just a grumpasaurus.

On a positive note, it was the first time I’d been there after they changed their photography policy, and it felt right to see people snapping away on their digicams and big honkin’ DSLRs. My idea of art is something you can take with you, in a manner of speaking, and look at, think about again, share with others. So being able to take photos for personal use in an art museum feels very natural.